One of our teachers at school, Mr O’leary, loved to tell us how his particular subject was more important than any of the others we were studying. Amusingly, he taught Spanish, and we were having none of his unwarranted hubris. It’s a sure sign that karma is alive and well in this world that several decades later I found myself living in Spain with a less than adequate grasp of the language. Si sólo hubiera escuchado. I should indeed have listened.

I remember that this outrageous pimping of what we considered to be one of the least relevant subjects in the curriculum prompted us as a class to challenge each of our other teachers in turn to tell us why they thought their subjects were the most important. Well, not all of them. Some teachers gave off such an air of #dontfuckwithme you’d no sooner ask them a left field question than you’d offer them a cigarette behind the gym block. The others? Well, most gave the routine and predictable declarations we kind of expected. “If you don’t understand physics then you can’t understand how the world works”; “ learning about religious values prepares you spiritually for life”; “without mathematics you won’t get very far in the future” etc etc. We had no idea if they actually believed the guff they spouted, but we supposed that they did.

No, only one teacher floored us with his answer. Mr Phillips taught history. He was a psychopath, one of those softly spoken undemonstrative types, but an unhinged lunatic nonetheless, and I’d wrongly imagined he was the last teacher anyone would dream of throwing a playful question at. But someone amongst us had. There was an involuntary and collective intake of breath as we waited for the inevitable punitive outcome, possibly three weeks detention or a mass strapping of the entire class (corporal punishment and Mr Phillips were well acquainted). He stopped his normally endless pacing about the classroom and we all watched the replay of our short lives flash before us. “Well, what do we learn from history?” he barely whispered back at us, staring at the floor (he never allowed eye contact) and clearly revelling in this golden opportunity to impress a group of terrified 12 year-olds. After a moment of pause, he supplied the answer, “we learn nothing from history”, and left it at that. We were dumbfounded, though none of us was remotely brave enough to ask him to elaborate. We were more than happy he hadn’t murdered anyone.

Of course Mr Phillips knew that over the coming years the hard knocks of life would make the truth of his statement abundantly clear. And they did, oh yeah they did.

And in fairness to Mr O’leary, the man who had unwittingly started it all, he had been taking a wider view of language learning, perhaps with a portentous eye on a shrinking world and the forthcoming information revolution. It wasn’t a preposterous bigging-up of Spanish per se, but more an impassioned plea for us to take seriously the notion that nothing in life was ever going to be more important to us than learning how to communicate with our fellow man.

Those teachers who taught me my maths, chemistry, English, physics, geography and biology were far more engaging and likeable characters than Mr O’leary and Mr Phillips ever were. Yet they are the two guys who left me the most profound insights to life. I know it’s a little late but as I embark on a tour of Spain that will encompass a fair bit of history and (still) inadequate communication skills, I doff my cap to them.